Summary
Fredric Jameson, observing in Late Marxism that Adorno adopts Marx's view about the abstract character of all historical forms of exchange, adds that the abstractions characteristic of exchange profoundly affect society because they extend across the whole range of distinct human activities (from production to the law, from culture to political forms, and not excluding the psyche and the more obscure 'equivalents' of unconscious desire). Yet, even as he argues that "society's law of motion has been abstracting from its individual subjects, degrading them to mere executors, mere partners in social wealth and social struggle for thousands of years,"2 Adorno recognizes that a society in which exchange is merely episodic and fragmentary (a barter society, for example) must be distinguished from late capitalist society where abstract exchange relations insinuate themselves into nearly every aspect of social life while commodifying virtually all nature.
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Extract
Adorno's Endgame
Fredric Jameson, observing in Late Marxism that Adorno adopts Marx's view about the abstract character of all historical forms of exchange, adds that the abstractions characteristic of exchange profoundly affect society because they extend "across the whole range of distinct human activities (from production to the law, from culture to political forms, and not excluding the psyche and the more obscure 'equivalents' of unconscious desire)."1 Indeed, Adorno examines the negative effects of abstract exchange relations on both individuals and the natural world in much of his work. Yet, even as he argues that "society's law of motion has been abstracting from its individual subjects, degrading them to mere executors, mere partners in social wealth and social struggle for thousands of years,"2 Adorno recognizes that a society in which exchange is merely episodic and fragmentary (a barter society, for example) must be distinguished from late capitalist society where abstract exchange relations insinuate themselves into nearly every aspect of social life while commodifying virtually all nature.
Today, the concentration of capital has reached such a size that capitalism appears to be "an institution, an expression of the entire society." Now pervading society, "the old fetish character of commodities, which reflects human relations as though they were relations between things, ends in the socially totalitarian aspect of capital."3 Following Marx, then, Adorno also adopts the view that commodity exchange has taken on a life of its own to which human life is now completely subordinate. To emphasize this point, he compares the "real total movement of society" to Hegel's world spirit: like the Weltgeist, Western society has effectively dissociated itself from the actions of living individuals whose labour reproduces it and continues to sustain it, thereby rendering them virtually powerless to change it (ND, 304). Individuals do not just depend on society for their material survival; they are also "entwined in society." The individual "owes society its existence in the most literal sense" because its entire "content comes from society."4By reducing individuals to agents and bearers of exchange value, late capitalist society has adversely affected the process of individuation. Viewing individuation as a positive achievement, Adorno criticizes our current subordination to exchange relations because it compromises our potentially emancipatory powers of critical self-reflection and seriously undermines prospects for changing our destructive and self-destructive relationship to nature. In fact, Adorno predicted the catastrophic annihilation of nature under capitalism. Following a discussion of Adorno's views about individuation and the individual's practical relationship to nature in labour, I shall ...See the full content of this document
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